Exploiting sink movement for energy-efficient load-balancing in wireless sensor networks

ABSTRACT

Prolonging the lifetime is an important design consideration for battery powered wireless sensor networks. In a network with stationary sink, the sensor nodes located near the sink have to relay data from the rest of the network and thus deplete their energy very quickly. A sink mobility strategy was proposed in [1], which manages the sink to move along the periphery of the network for load-balancing. In this paper, based on the work in [1], we study the relationship of the energy efficiency and load-balancing. A novel mobility scheme for sink has been proposed to achieve the energy efficient load-balancing. By this scheme, the sink is controlled to move along a circle trajectory in a stationary for data buffering. All sensed data are forwarded into the annularity area firstly and then collected by the mobile sink. We find the optimum trajectory of sink movement with consideration of energy consumption and load-balancing and present how to find the location for the buffering area. Compared with the static sink scheme and the existing mobile sink scheme, the proposed is the most energy-efficient and it can reduce the load by 95% and 70%, respectively.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Wireless communication

General Terms:
Performance

Keywords:
data gathering, load-balancing, mobile sink, network lifetime, sensor networks